134 Marguerite Yourcenar: Piranesi at Petite Plaisance

By Carl Little

When I moved to with my family in 1989, we lived in the first house on the left on Oak Hill Road, in what we came to call, with a smile, "downtown Somesville." The property, my mother’s, backed onto Brookside Cemetery, one of the most charming and idyllic sites of final repose in New England. Not long after settling in, I learned that the world-famous novelist Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–1987) was buried there alongside her longtime companion and translator, Grace Frick (1903–1979). Interested in literary things, I set out to learn more about this writer who, in 1981, was the first woman to be admitted to the French Academy since it had been founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635.1 I started by reading her masterwork, Memoirs of , and wrote a short review of it for the Somesville Library and Mount Desert Island Historical Society newsletter, Betwixt the Hills. First published in 1951, the book takes the form of an extended letter written by the dying Roman Emperor Hadrian to his adopted grandson, . Hadrian reigned from 117 to 138 AD. The book demonstrates Yourcenar’s special genius for reviving the past.2 In my review, I noted how parts of the book were relevant to our times. "If one substitutes presidents for emperors, the following statement seems as applicable to our country as it is to ancient Richard Estes, Marguerite Yourcenar, Oil on canvas, Rome: ‘experience shows that in spite of our infinite 1985, 95 by 45½ centimeters, FNAC 35381, Centre national des arts plastiques Dépôt du Centre national Previous page: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Avanzi del Tempio del Dio des arts plastiques au Sénat depuis 2009, ©Richard Canopo della Villa Adriana in Tivoli (Remains of the Temple of the Estes/CNAP. Courtesy of the artist God Canopus at Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli), from Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome), 1768, etching, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/178353

135 care in choosing our successors, the mediocre The couple started looking at emperors will always outnumber the wise, and properties on the island in the summer that at least one fool will reign per century.’"3 of 1948, and they purchased a house in Over time, I learned more about Yourcenar. I Northeast Harbor in 1952. French literary read her books, including her remarkable tribute to critic Matthieu Galey, who interviewed the eighteenth century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Yourcenar at her Maine home in the Piranesi (1720–1778), and wrote about her on several 1970s, likened Petite Plaisance to an occasions. In a review of Yvon Bernier’s book about "idyllic shepherd’s cottage of the past Petite Plaisance, Yourcenar’s home in Northeast century: all wood, modest but livable, Harbor, I expressed regret at having arrived on comfortable without affectation, full of Mount Desert Island the year after her death and books and other well-used objects—it offered a fantasy account of meeting the great writer: is a house that is lived in, in which even the least significant item has its special It’s in the Northeast Harbor Library or perhaps history or symbolic importance."7 at the Colonel’s bakery, and I introduce myself, Yourcenar told Galey that no one was speaking the French I have recently acquired sure exactly when the house was built, but through graduate studies at Middlebury she dated it to around 1866, "rather old College. Yourcenar is pleased with my accent for this island, which had few dwellings and appearance and invites me home for tea. on it until the middle of the nineteenth We sit in her kitchen …and speak of Piranesi’s century." She reported that the wood used prison series, of Hadrian, of Brookside to build it "was cut on the mountain ten or Cemetery (where, I tell her, my children play fifteen miles from here and floated down hide-and-seek among the tombstones).4 on the sort of glacial fjord [Somes Sound] that cuts the island almost in two."8 Born in Belgium and raised in France, Mount Desert Island would become Yourcenar first came to the United States in Yourcenar’s refuge, her home base, to 1937, to live with Grace Frick. She and Frick which she would, over the years, return spent several years in Hartford, . from her extensive travels. While she didn’t Frick was academic dean at Hartford Junior attach "a great deal of importance to the College and then taught at Connecticut College, house itself," it served, she said, "as an and Yourcenar lectured on French literature asylum, a cell for self-knowledge, as Saint and taught part-time at Sarah Lawrence. "They Catherine of Siena might have said."9 spent their first ‘married’ years there," writes Petite Plaisance would prove to be Yourcenar’s biographer Josyane Savigneau.5 the perfect place for writing; Yourcenar The women spent their first summer on Mount completed two of her most acclaimed Desert Island in 1942. Some of their earliest books, Memoirs of Hadrian and The stays were in a small cabin on Brookside Road, Abyss, while in residence, and many of which runs into the cemetery where their her other works were composed and/ ashes would eventually be interred. They were or edited there. In her notes, she wrote enchanted by this "storybook" setting.6 about the creation of Memoirs of Hadrian,

136 she recalled how, on December 26, 1950, was often called by her neighbors, was part of the "on an evening of freezing cold and in community. She came to embrace her life on the the almost polar silence of Mount Desert island in many ways, from inviting neighbors over to Island off the Atlantic shore," she strived, celebrate the new year with eggnog, to watching the sunrise from the summit of Cadillac Mountain.12 to live again through the smothering "That’s why I like living in very small towns heat of a day in July in the year 138 or villages," Yourcenar told Galey. "When the in Baiae, to feel the weight of a sheet grocer comes to make a delivery, he’ll stay on weary, heavy limbs, and to catch and have a glass of wine or cider with me, the barely perceptible sound of that when he has the time." She continued: tideless sea as from time to time it reached a man whose whole attention I have as much respect and esteem for my was concentrated upon other cleaning woman as I might have for a sister. murmurs, those of his approaching In the summertime, children from the death. I tried to go as far as the kindergarten come every now and then to last sip of water, the last spasm of play in the yard. The gardener who tends pain, the last image in his mind. the property across the way is a friend who Now the emperor had but to die.10 comes over when it’s cold to visit with me and to drink a cup of coffee or tea.13 Yourcenar’s remarkable novella "An Obscure Man" (1982), one of her favorite Yourcenar’s involvement in the community works, is partly set on Mount Desert included activism. At one point, she carried a sign Island, in the early seventeenth century, protesting the Vietnam War in a march in Bar not long after the destruction of a colony Harbor. She recounted: "People passed us by; they of French Jesuits by the English. The island weren’t terribly interested in our little group of also found its way into her dreams. In men and women wearing sandwich boards."14 Dreams and Destinies, she notes that on Yourcenar credited the island with nurturing the night of April 12–13, 1970, she dreamt her growth as a writer—and enhancing her that she found herself on a road, "roughly appreciation of the natural world. "It was here the one extending from Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island that I began to take a to Seal Harbor," seeking to "arrive at the greater interest in trees and animals, in the natural shore of this last locality in order to lie environment as a whole," she told Galey.15 down beside the water." By the "hills and The author’s strong connections to the greater little lake of the Rockefeller property," Mount Desert Island region are highlighted she discovered "a horde of wild horses."11 in a short film, L’Isle heureuse (Happy Island), Despite what some commentators made in 1984 by her companion Jerry Wilson. and biographers have argued, Yourcenar In the film, Yourcenar visits Birdsacre, an avian did not live an isolated life, holed up rehabilitation center in Ellsworth, where an owl in a small house on a back street in perches on her arm. She also travels to Sutton Northeast Harbor. "Madame," as she Island, one of the Cranberry Isles, to visit the grave

137 The figures in the photograph are (left to right): John Reynolds (2), John Reynolds (1), Madame Yourcenar, and Louis Reynolds. They are standing in front of the Manset fishing house on the Stanley Fish Wharf, which was used to keep accounts for buying lobsters and for selling gasoline to the boats. Grace Frick, Marguerite Yourcenar with Three Portuguese Sailors, ca. 1943–1944, black-and- white photograph, 3½ by 5½ inches. Courtesy of Petite Plaisance

of her friend, poet Hortense Flexner (1885–1973), of small things with her island neighbors, whose poems she had translated into French.16 often with the least sophisticated of From the time of the publication of Memoirs them, has been a spiritual food."18 of Hadrian, Yourcenar was a literary celebrity. When Walter Kaiser, one of Television crews from around the world showed Yourcenar’s translators, delivered her up in Northeast Harbor to tape interviews. When eulogy at the Northeast Harbor Union the film adaptation of her novel Coup de Grâce Church on January 16, 1988, he chose a came out in 1977, a private screening was held at citation from her interview with Galey to the Maine Coast Mall cinema in Ellsworth.17 conclude his tribute. Yourcenar had been When the distinguished author and Seal told by a friend who had undergone a Harbor resident August Heckscher reported on near-death experience that one’s life did, his friend’s induction to the French Academy, he indeed, flash before one’s eyes. The writer wondered how she had been able to deal with the didn’t like this idea, believing parts of the hoopla. "The answer, of course, is that Marguerite flashback would be disagreeable. She would Yourcenar has lived for many years the solitary life prefer to be selective in what she saw. of the mind," he wrote; "modern existence with its To the self-addressed question, "But fuss and clutter had passed her by." Heckscher gave what would I like to see again?" Yourcenar credit to Yourcenar’s fellow Maine islanders: "Talk offered a litany of places she had visited

138 Petite Plaisance sign in the snow. Photograph by the author

and views she had taken in during her kitchen closet, the manual typewriter on her lifetime of travel. Among these views desk, the many books arranged on shelves.20 were several of her Maine island home, At some point in the early 1990s, I arranged to including "the huge icicles that form on visit Petite Plaisance, which was managed at the time the rocks here on Mount Desert Island, by the writer’s former secretary, Jean Lunt, a resident icicles which, come April, form channels of Northeast Harbor. I was delighted to find on the for the melting snows that flow with walls a number of prints by the eighteenth-century a geyser’s roar." Her final image was artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). I from among her more recent memories: had discovered Piranesi’s views of Rome while "Easter’s rising sun..., viewed this year working for the prints and drawings dealer Lucien from a rocky spur of Mount Desert, high Goldschmidt in in the early 1980s.21 above a half-frozen lake hatched with According to a note in "Reflections on the fissures by the approach of spring."19 Composition of the Memoirs of Hadrian," Yourcenar At Yourcenar’s death, Petite Plaisance and Frick purchased four Piranesi prints at an artists’ became a permanent shrine to her life supply shop in New York City around 1941. They and to the life of Grace Frick. The house eventually owned ten prints. Hung in the parlor is maintained exactly as Yourcenar and the living room, these remarkable images were left it—the refrigerator hidden in a a constant presence in Yourcenar’s daily life.22

139 Story Litchfield, The Living Room, color photo. Reproduced from Yvon Bernier, Petite Plaisance: Marguerite Yourcenar 1903–1987, trans. Daniel Sloate, Northeast Harbor, Maine: Petite Plaisance Trust, 2000. Courtesy of Story Litchfield

Yourcenar traced her interest in Piranesi last days of the Roman Empire, when and Emperor Hadrian to a visit to the latter’s Romans had ceased to live there."24 villa in Tibur, now Tivoli, Italy, early in her life. Yourcenar admired how Piranesi’s "What sparked the whole idea [for Memoirs of engravings exuded "a feeling of duration, Hadrian] as far as I’m concerned was a visit I of time’s slow corrosion." The studies made when I was twenty to the villa Adriana," she emphasized "the beauty of objects that recounted. "That visit also accounts for my interest have gradually been eroded by storm, in Piranesi, for among Piranesi’s thousands of encrusted by vegetation, buried in earth drawings of Rome are sixteen of the villa Adriana and mud, and yet have also been given, before it was pillaged by the archaeologists."23 somehow, new shape and substance Yourcenar was fascinated by this two-hundred- by these same forces of nature."25 and-fifty-acre complex of pools, baths, fountains, In her remarkable essay "The Dark and classical Greek architecture set in the central Brain of Piranesi," written on Mount Italian countryside. The emperor had the villa built Desert Island in the years 1959–1961, as a retreat from Rome; it later became his official Yourcenar expressed her admiration for residence. "What stood then was a palace in ruins," this artist whom she refers to as "the Yourcenar recalled, "encrusted with roots and interpreter and virtually the inventor of brambles, rather like the castle of Sleeping Beauty, Rome’s tragic beauty." She portrays an yet still fairly close to what it looked like in the artist so obsessed with his subjects that he

140 ignores his own well-being while producing author returning home to Northeast Harbor from his "strange linear universe." Piranesi was her travels to some of the great cities of the world, a master of ruins, she says, of "temples one senses that the two places—this home of and basilicas lying open and as though Yourcenar’s and the villa in Tibur—served a similar turned inside out by the depredations of purpose, as retreats from the madding crowd.29 time and of man, so that the interior has I like to think of the famous author, as she now become a kind of exterior, everywhere made her way from room to room, stopping in invaded by space like a ship by water."26 front of the Piranesi prints to explore anew these Several of the prints in the Petite ancient haunted places recorded by the Italian Plaisance collection are, fittingly, views artist’s brilliant draftsmanship. They were portals, of Hadrian’s Villa. One of them, showing as it were, to another place and time, allowing her the remains of the chapel of Canopus, to escape, if but momentarily, the modern world had special appeal to Yourcenar. In her with all its discontents. "When all the involved description of it, she noted its central calculations prove false, and the philosophers "round structure, burst open like a themselves have nothing more to tell us," she skull, from which fallen trees and wrote in Memoirs of Hadrian, "it is excusable to brush hang vaguely down, like strands turn to the random twitter of birds, or toward the of hair." The "genius of Piranesi," she distant mechanisms of the stars"—or, she might observed, "truly caught the element of have added, to those wondrous depictions of a hallucination here: he has sensed the ruined villa on the slopes of the Tiburine Hills.30 long-continued ritual of mourning, the tragic architecture of an inner world."27 — Born in New York City, Carl Little holds degrees from Dartmouth One senses that Yourcenar saw in College, Columbia University and Middlebury College, where he Piranesi a kindred soul, one who was received a master’s degree in French. Little is the author of many connected by art to earlier eras, an art books, including monographs on John Singer Sargent, Winslow archaeologist of sorts, immersed in Homer, and Edward Hopper. His most recent title is Philip Barter: Forever Maine (Marshall Wilkes). He edited his brother the past. She might easily have been David Little’s Art of Katahdin and co-authored with him Art describing herself when she pointed out of Acadia, 2016, and Paintings of Portland, 2018 (all Down how fragments of antiquity were for East Books). Little moved to Mount Desert Island in 1989. He is him "what the dissection of cadavers communications manager at the Maine Community Foundation. 28 is for a painter of the nude." Acknowledgments: This essay was inspired by finding several "The Villa was the tomb of my travels," Piranesi prints on the walls at Petite Plaisance, the home of Yourcenar has the emperor say in Memoirs Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick in Northeast Harbor, of Hadrian, "the last encampment of while on a visit in the early 1990s. The author is especially grateful to Joan E. Howard, director of Petite Plaisance, author of From the nomad, the equivalent, though in Violence to Vision: Sacrifice in the Works of Marguerite marble, of the tents and pavilions of the Yourcenar and "We Met in Paris": Grace Frick and Her Life princes of Asia." Was Petite Plaisance a with Marguerite Yourcenar, and translator of Marguerite kind of Hadrian’s Villa for the author? Yourcenar: Inventing a Life by Joyce Savigneau. Thanks, also, to the Yale University Art Gallery and the Portland Art Museum for Reading Savigneau’s biography, with permission to reproduce prints by Piranesi from their collections. its recurring narrative of the famed

141 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Rovine d’una Galleria di Statue nella Villa Adriana a Tivoli from Vedute di Roma, 1770, etching and engraving on paper, plate: 18 x 22 15/16 in; sheet: 21 7/16 x 31 1/8 in, Gift of David T. Mason in memory of James D. Abbott, life member of the Portland Art Association. Public domain, 64.11.10

142 — 13. Goldhammer, Marguerite Yourcenar: With Open Eyes, 191-192. In a September 1979 letter, she described the townspeople who 1. Master realist and fellow Northeast Harbor resident were helping her as Grace was dying: "… a number of ladies from Richard Estes painted her official portrait for the the village, the old fisherman, Dick, the gardeners, Harry and academy. Elliot—who come by with things for us: one might bring a dinner 2. Carl Little, ed., Betwixt the Hills: Newsletter of dish she’s made or some sweets, another some vegetables from his the Somesville Library and The Mount Desert Island garden, and someone else an offer to run errands in her car… . Historical Society, no. 6, Winter 1989. Such are the blessings, in the darkest times, of living in a small 3. Ibid., 3. town." Savigneau, 374. 4. Carl Little, "There’s great pleasure in Petite 14. Marguerite Yourcenar: With Open Eyes, 236. Plaisance," Maine Times, September 16, 1994. 15. Ibid., 105. 5. Josyanne Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar: 16. Flexner’s "Poems for Sutton Island" were first published Inventing a Life, trans. Joan E. Howard, (Chicago: as part of a bilingual edition of her selected verse, Présentation University of Chicago Press, 1993), 141. Yourcenar critique d’Hortense Flexner suivi de Choix de poèmes, translated became a U.S. citizen in 1947. by Yourcenar, published by Gallimard in 1969. The Sutton 6. "… A stream and lots of ducks, little wooden Island verses were later published in a limited edition by August bridges, and a bit farther away, the cemetery-garden Heckscher, accompanied by photographs by Claude Huston. whose silence was hardly broken by the footsteps of Heckscher also published Yourcenar’s Suite D’Estampes pour Kou- people coming to visit ‘their’ dead." Ibid., 147. In a Kou-Hai featuring color woodcuts by Seal Harbor artist Nancy video from the archives of the Institut National de McCormick. In 1993, Port in a Storm Bookstore printed a limited l’Audiovisuel dated January 1, 1972, Yourcenar is edition of "Poems for Sutton Island" with an afterword by Carl shown walking past the mill pond in Somesville on Little and woodcut illustrations by Somesville printmaker Polly her way to the "little cabin pleasantly located near a Cote. stream." 17. Savigneau, 357. 7. Arthur Goldhammer, trans. 1984, Marguerite 18. August Heckscher, "The lady from Maine,"Christian Science Yourcenar: With Open Eyes. Conversations with Monitor, Feb. 27, 1981. It was reported that Yourcenar’s election to Matthieu Galey, (Boston: Beacon Press), xi. the academy upstaged the plight of the hostages in Iran on French 8. Ibid., 106. television news. 9. Ibid., 111. 19. Savigneau, 457-458. 10. Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian and 20. "In her will, Yourcenar entrusted [Petite Plaisance] to a Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian, foundation—what Americans call ‘a board of trustees.’ If at all trans. Grace Frick, in collaboration with the author, possible, the house must remain the way it was at her death and be (New York: Modern Library, 1984), 342. open to the public during the summer months. If this arrangement were no longer viable, the will goes on to provide, the furnishings 11. Marguerite Yourcenar, Dreams and Destinies, and objects found in the house should be sold in France, and the trans. Donald Flanell Friedman, (New York: St. cottage itself would pass to an association for environmental and Martin’s Press, 1999), 111. natural protection." Savigneau, 204. 12. For a sustained and convincing argument for how 21. I worked for Mr. Goldschmidt from fall 1980 to May of 1985. living in Maine influenced Yourcenar’s life and art, Among his Piranesi-passionate customers was the writer Susan see Bérengère Deprez, Marguerite Yourcenar and the Sontag. USA: From Prophecy to Protest (Brussels, Belgium: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2009). Deprez ties episodes from Yourcenar’s American travels, including a 1959 trip to Mount Katahdin, to images in some of her books.

143 22. "I can tell you (because this information is included in my forthcoming book, 'We Met in Paris': Grace Frick and Her Life with Marguerite Yourcenar) that the Hartford Times reported on September 16, 1940, that Grace Frick was decorating the walls of Hartford Junior College, which she administered, with ‘a series of prints and photographs taken from various masterpieces of art, including some original engravings from Piranesi.' So it would seem MY & GF had purchased at least some of their Piranesi prints even before 1941." Joan E. Howard, email to author, September 23, 2017. "Altogether we have ten Piranesis. Only View of the Forum is not displayed." Joan E. Howard, email to author, October 13, 2017. 23. Marguerite Yourcenar: With Open Eyes, 117. Yourcenar would return to the villa with Grace Frick later in her life. In a description of that visit, she imagines "the thousands of lives" that have "followed in succession here between Hadrian’s time and ours," including "the gypsies of Piranesi’s day." Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, 345. 24. Marguerite Yourcenar: With Open Eyes, 117. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa are maintained by the Polo Museale del Lazio. 25. Ibid. 26. Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985), 88, 97. 27. Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, 324. Yourcenar bemoaned the transformation of the villa into a tourist site. "This new décor gives to the once melancholy Canopus something of the air of a studio set, ready for a film version of ‘life in Imperial Rome.’" Ibid., 346. 28. Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi, 99. 29. Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, 128. 30. Ibid. 26.

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